Several Steem accounts hacked - Who has access to your account?

Recently, there have been quite some attempts at hacking and abusing Steemit accounts. The hackers have taken advantage of accounts that have given authorities to dApps on the platform and used this to vote and more. What is it all about?

There are many dApps that are no longer active and updated on Steem. If you used these, then you had to give them the authority to use your private posting key and maybe also your private active key. In some cases, you might have even used your master password during the process. Those dApps might not be active anymore, but your permissions are still active. This has given a window of opportunity to hackers, and they have used those lately. But, what can we all do about it?

Lots of articles have been posted about this recently here on Steemit, but I will just give you some very simple steps here, since you are a fellow member of the Project Hope community, and it is important that everyone here pay attention to this as well!

How to check authorities and remove dApps with permission to your account!

The first thing you should do is to visit: https://www.steemworld.org/@yourusername

There you should click the "Account Details" and later select "Authorities" from the second menu.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a long list here of apps like Busy.org, Steempeak, TripleAAA, and who knows what else. But, since I am not using any of those anymore, I decided to remove them and no longer give them the right to vote with my account. How is that done?

You click the "Edit authorities" button and find the permissions that you want to get rid of. I am currently using SteemAuto so I do not want to use it, but if I would have wanted to remove it, I would just click the "X" button to the right and then confirm that I want to remove the permission (you need to enter your private key for this to take effect.)

At this moment, this is the most important thing you can do to secure your account. Remove those all permissions, and make sure to only let apps you actually use and trust have the rights to your account here on Steemit!

It might seem like a little change, but it is a very important one.

And when you are first there, make sure to vote for @steemchiller as your witness on Steemit if you haven't done so yet. He is a great guy and he definitely deserves your witness vote if you haven't voted for him yet! :)